History and stories
The PlayStation Network was dark for 24 days
Millions of people tried to log in to play games online and could not. It took Sony a week to explain why.
1 min readStory
The short version
In April 2011, an intrusion forced Sony to shut down its gaming network for more than three weeks, and details of 77 million accounts were exposed.
The story
Between April 17 and 19, 2011, intruders got into Sony’s PlayStation Network, the online service behind its game consoles. On April 20, Sony shut the network down.
Personal details from about 77 million accounts were exposed, including names, addresses, email addresses, dates of birth and passwords. Sony said card data was encrypted, but warned that it could not rule out that it had been taken.
Sony waited about a week before telling users their data had been exposed, which drew criticism from governments in several countries. The network stayed offline for 24 days while it was rebuilt.
Why it mattered
It was one of the largest data breaches of its time and the longest outage the network had ever had. The UK’s data protection regulator later fined Sony, saying its security measures “were simply not good enough.” The week of silence before users were told drew criticism of its own.
The lesson today
Two things made this worse than it needed to be: the long outage and the slow warning. Both come down to planning. Knowing in advance how you would rebuild systems and how you would tell the people affected turns a crisis into a set of steps someone already wrote down.
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